AI Tokens Market Cap Hit $5.1 Billion: Hype or Hope?

While it may seem too early to call, Artificial Intelligence appears to have consolidated its spot as one emerging technology to pay bigger attention to in 2023. AI cryptocurrency tokens are joyfully surfing this rising hype wave to smash incredible records, with tokens like $AIRI gaining as much as 1000% over the last 30 days. On a closer look at the last seven days, hundreds of AI Tokens led by The Graph’s GRT, Singularity.NET’s AGIX, and Fetch.ai’s FET, have bolstered the sector’s token market cap to $5.1 Billion, representing 0.4% of the total market cap.

The current market leader, $GRT – the native token of The Graph protocol, which indexes queries from a broad range of blockchains and sidechains – currently sits at the 41st position on the overall crypto rankings with a current market valuation of $0.17. $GRT is slowly picking up the pace back to its February 2021 ATH and has registered over 2,000 new unique addresses over the last seven days.

Closely following $GRT is the $AGIX, the native AI token for Singularity. NET. The native token for Web3’s most popular AI marketplace has recorded over 800% gains since the start of the year. Sitting pretty at the 81st spot on the top 100 cryptocurrencies list, AGIX is yet to record any development-induced price surge since its launch in 2017. Its recent surge can only be attributed to the influence of external hype surrounding AI.

The Catalyst Behind the Surge

As Forbes puts it, Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency are sectors with a near-endless supply of hype. With the combination of both as AI tokens, it is only rational to expect explosive value surge even among tokens lying fallow but related to AI.

Both the news of Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s lofty plans to launch a competent rival, Bard, have contributed to the excitement around AI tokens. ChatGPT, which gained one million users within a week of launch and 100 million users seven weeks after, is rumoured to become the next big iteration for user search experience. 

While there is significantly less synergy between the functionality of AI technology and cryptocurrencies, many analysts see the potential at the points where AI augments the Web3 Metaverse experience with the integration of true-trained digital twins displaying interactive communication capabilities. Gartner has predicted that AI may erase all efforts to claw back on energy consumption by 2025 if its projected use scale continues in that trajectory.